Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

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I love looking at old processes like this and seeing how they influence modern methodologies. The tape out in particular is really interesting, and reminds me of the old school photo and pasteup techniques[1] that graphic designers used to use.

It makes me a bit sad that it's getting harder to find places to get hands-on with these old manual processes, because it's a great way to wrap your head around the fundamental concepts of the thing you're learning. I'm younger than the author, but well into the internet age we were still taught manual pasteup and letterpress on old Heidelberg platen presses in our high school graphic design courses and I draw on some of that process knowledge even today.

It also feels like those experiences were really helpful for learning to think systematically and predicting how the consequence of the design decision I make now will affect me down the line. Today if I screwed up a plate it would take me a few minutes to fix; back then it would've taken literally hours and, if we were running business, cost a ton of money in lost production time.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paste_up

I love looking at old processes only to think "Boy...we've lost the ability to make mechanical things well because almost everything (barring servos, actuators) is now software controlled". In electronics, it is dumbed down to reading a 870 page datasheet about an all-in-one-mother-of-all-peripherals SOC. No more discrete circuitry, no more logic chips, none of that.

Note that I am not saying those solutions were better, but there was a lot of hardwork, talent and intense discipline in making stuff back in the day. Drawings were hand drawn! Some guy was bending down for 3 days straight to make that schematic!

It's all too viscerally physical and mechanical. I want a time machine to go to the 70's for a bit, and furiously document and interview people. Lot of this knowledge and expertise is lost because we don't need this stuff anymore.

Remember things when they had toggle switches and knobs? What happened? We have touch screens that ask us to scan the QR code of the water filter before dispensing water from the Fridge. Oh, but it shows today's weather on the door. So great.

On Hackernews, we are such an intense bit of people - we should bring some of the old tech back and simplify our world. If you're in software, build flat, simple and fast apps that are maintainable. Make them composable and modular. If you're in hardware, build high quality stuff for twice the price but then convince the user through honest & truthful marketing that this product is better for you in the long run. Instead, the rush these days is to market products with abhorrent psychological tricks and backstab users with all kinds of dark patterns. Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.

The Boeing 757 (circa 1980) was the last jetliner drafted by hand. It was also the last that had a wooden mockup.

I am not sure what exactly is lost?

The mechanical things are still there, and it is even easier to make them. Unfortunately, it turns out that they are expensive, so they have been relegated to either very expensive devices or to beginner's devices. Take a look at high-end scope or ultrasound machine control panel -- they are full of beautifully designed knobs and switches. And on the opposite end of spectrum, if you look at instructables/hackaday, there are tons of project to interface anything mechanical.

Same goes for the discrete circuity. Get one of those cheap plastic solar lights -- you may find there is no controller in sight, just a bunch of old-style transistors. And on the other side, no SOC will have a 1GHz AFE or 20 amp output.

Toggle switches and mechanical interaction in general was abandoned because it costs more: not just the parts, but having a human assemble them into the chassis.

>Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.

Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.

At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while living.

> Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.

Once upon a time there were many profitable business models for selling software.

Then software got big. You weren't selling a thousand copies anymore, now it's a billion.

The economics of software is that the price you "need" to charge goes down when the number of users goes up. If it costs ten million to develop and you have a thousand users, they each have to pay at least $10,000. If you have a million users they only have to pay $10.

If you have a billion users they each only have to pay $0.01.

You can get more than the $0.01 from each user through advertising. What you can't do is get an amount on that scale through payment processing, because the transaction overhead is larger than that.

So now you have a user that the advertiser is willing to pay $0.03 to advertise to. The users themselves are willing to pay $0.05 to not be spied on, but you haven't got any efficient way to get $0.05 from them. It'd have to be much more than that to justify the payment processing overhead, and the user isn't willing to pay that much.

So it's not a matter of the users being unwilling to pay, it's that we don't have an efficient way for them to pay that small of an amount.

I appreciate your logic, but Google Contributor solved the transaction overhead problem you've described (and was killed anyway).

Maybe if it wasn't locked to a small area, and had people willing to back it long term, it wouldn't fail?

A common Google problem is that for all that they are a global company, they can't launch shit globally. I was really interested in using Google Contributor, both sides, but limited launch meant that I could only look from far away and never ever encounter a site using it. Hell, I think some of the engineers who worked on it weren't in the very small group allowed to use it.

The real price of software includes the price of delivery.

Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist party and that organ harvester from Moldova.

> The real price of software includes the price of delivery.

The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.

(Well, it's slightly above zero, because all the networking equipment uses electricity, but you pay for your part of that in your power and Internet bills.)

>The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.

Let me know the name of the apt mirror you're running. I'll be sure to point the couple hundred machines I admin for their hourly updates.

That's not delivery, that's the storage part of distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager

You’re caching packages locally, right?

No. Delivery is free right?

(But yes because it isn't.)

AWS, which charges ridiculously high prices for bulk bandwidth, charges ~$0.15/GB, and half that if you have high volumes. If your software is 50MB, that's less than a penny. Meanwhile, if even this is too much for you, BitTorrent exists.

Point is: it’s important to keep the grand picture in mind and once in a while step back and think - “Shit...what am I doing?” even though you can’t do much about it due to family, responsibilities and other hard realities of life. When building a company, I don’t want to just build something that deceives people, deploy shady tactics and dark patterns. I want to run an honest business that I can reflect back in life and say “yep, it was a struggle but I did the right things.”

When I was in college I remember "changing the world, one line of code at a time" being a popular bio on linkedin.

We laugh at it, but that kind of thinking is sort of great.

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